


Baby of Mine

by bartagnanz



Category: Doctor Sleep (2019), Doctor Sleep - Stephen King
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, F/M, This tag says it all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:27:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22062535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bartagnanz/pseuds/bartagnanz
Summary: The lost children of the True Knot.
Relationships: Crow Daddy/Rose the Hat
Comments: 7
Kudos: 31





	Baby of Mine

_“What they’d give just for the right to hold you.”_

* * *

The first is unexpected.

Largely because Rose did not expect it to be possible.

It isn’t until well into the fifth moon that Rose starts to notice a change in her body. If Crow were being honest, he’d sensed the life growing within her long before that. Quickening since they’d been intimate in the pass between a mountain and the tribe in the next valley.

He’d been banished from his own when his chosen mate refused to conform to their rules.

“She is unpredictable, quick to anger,” the chieftain claimed. “You must make a choice: your family or your Rose.”

It should’ve been a difficult decision, but one smile from her was enough to bring the highest of men to their knees. And he’d sooner forsake those who’d condemned his abilities for the one person in the world who nurtured them. Who loved him all the more for them.

“My Crow,” she whispered against his hand as she ushered their child into the world. The blood and sweat mingled with the sand beneath her as she laboured well into the small hours of one morning of many. The rocks around them quaked, levitating with her screams and the force of her untamed powers.

He’d shifted from her side to her legs, to pull the babe from her the rest of the way.

He felt it before he saw it - the blood, so much blood, too much of it to mean anything good. The expected wail did not come and it’s in the silence that Rose realised.

Her screams continued, lamenting long after the birth, tearing into the night.

...

The second comes decades later at the turn of the century.

They’d been prudent for much of that time, careful so as not to endure the pain all over again, the pain that never stopped.

Rose is more contentious this time around, less flippant with her condition. The guilt from the idea that she’d caused the first riddled her entire being to the point she would not let Crow touch her for weeks at a time.

As the fourth moon passes, she disposes of her corsets despite the room in them she had yet to fill.

In secret, she’d gone to Grandpa Flick and asked him to find her a physician, a midwife to whom she would consult about the child’s health.

When Crow discovers this, he’s hurt she doesn’t trust his acute senses to monitor their baby. “This is what I do, Rose. My power hinges on the sound of others, and she,” he placed his hand on her belly, “is the loudest of us all.”

Rose looked at him in surprise. “You can hear her? Why can’t I?” She wouldn’t admit some part of her is jealous of his finely tuned ability to listen, she is much too proud for that. But she suspects he knows anyway. He knows her so well.

Crow’s mouth twitched, eyes soft, endeared to her. “Because she is a part of you right now. You are one. You feel only your power but it’s stronger than usual...” Rose nodded, “because you feel hers too.”

Her mouth finds his own then and it’s the first time she lets him touch her in months.

This happiness, however, is fleeting as she wakes the next morning in apuddle of her own blood, her shift is soaked through and his tunic faired no better.

Hours later, with the bloody bundle in his arms, Crow, red-eyed and heartsick, hands the body to Annie to bury.

Neither he nor Rose could bear to commit another child to the earth.

...

Rose is attacked shortly before the third and forth are ready to be born.

A stray bullet from a tommy gun ricochets off the bonnet of a Jaguar MK and finds its target in Rose’s lower back. The idiot Barry the Chunk comments on the make and model of the car when explaining to Crow what had happened. Doug has to hold him back from beating the man into the mud.

Sarey and Annie tend to Rose as best they could but her condition only worsens even after the bullet is removed and the wound heals over in a matter of minutes.

Crow makes a decision and asks Rose to let him lull her into a deep sleep. “I have to get them out of you,” he explained to her as she shook her head vehemently. “Baby, you’ll die if I don’t.”

Her throat is raw from the injury and her voice is weak when she answered. “Better me than them.” It’s a response that surprised everyone in the room but Crow. To the rest of the Knot, Rose’s first priority was her own longevity. To give that up for children, hers or otherwise, seemed highly unlikely.

Crow knew better.He’d never known another who loved quite as fiercely as his Rose. And she did nothing by halves.

When she inevitably succumbs to exhaustion, Crow works fast and removes the twins from her womb. Her steam, though drained, is still potent enough to heal the incision faster than he’d made it.

She wakes only moments later to find the once protruding bump almost completely flattened and back to normal.The fury she feels in an instant is rivalled only by the joyful disbelief that comes from hearing her children cry at the foot of the bed where their father held them.

In the way in which their siblings had been born still and lifeless, these two were very much alive. Alive, breathing and alerting the entire camp to their presence. They live long enough to develop their father’s rich complexion and the stark contrast that was their mother’s blue eyes.

It’s on the eve of their second birthday that they begin to cycle out.

In desperate agony, they cling to their parents as they vanish into the air, leaving only their tiny clothing behind. Crow weeps into them in full view of the Knot.

Rose is, in many ways, relieved they had nothing to bury. The graves would be too big; the hole of two miraculous years left behind is already much too large to fill.

That night, as Crow’s tears soak the skin of her chest, she wishes they, too, had been born dead.

...

The fifth is as unexpected as the first and its while their packing up to leave Florida, with the girl Violet’s scent of flowers in the air, that Rose feels the all too conspicuous nausea she’d come to attribute to only one thing.

“It’s happening again, Crow,” she tells him as he locks the canister away.

The look on his face is one of fear but not one he hasn’t felt before. The exhaustion is what weighs him down the most. After the loss of the twins, they’d tried their best to be cautious, but the frenzy that followed the intake of steam always rendered them deaf and blind to reality, to sense and mindfulness.

Caution and all forms of contraception had been blown to the wind in their delirium.

As expected, it ends much the same as the others and In the familiar dark aftermath, Rose tells Crow what had been weighing upon her heart throughout the entire pregnancy, and those that came before. “They are only safe inside me.”

She’s soaking in the overlarge bath tub at the front end of their trailer whilst Crow leans against the side, cleaning the blood from her weakened body. “That girl’s mother feels the same. “

“You can’t know that, Rosie,” he sniffs, his dark eyes framed with that equally familiar irritation that came only from mourning the loss of yet another child. 

She can’t look at him. It hurts too much to see his pain. Pain that her defected, barren body had caused.

“But I do,” she continued, knees brought tight to her chest. It hurts but she doesn’t care, it’s as good a distraction as any. “I feel it still. We aren’t far enough away that I don’t still hear her.“ They’d taken Violet only a few days prior but the local search teams led by her parents had been too loud for Rose to ignore.

Finally, with tears swollen in her eyes, she turned to Crow. “How could we?” 

“Rosie...”

She takes the hand he’d placed on her knee, urging him to look at her. “What we’ve felt for so long, the pain you and I have carried with us... we’ve made them feel it too. All those parents without their children. We took them away and that’s why we don’t deserve to keep ours.”

“No,” he shook his head, swallowing the cursed lump in his throat, keeping it from choking his words away. “I don’t believe that. I won’t.”

Rose dropped his hand, letting her own fall into the water, now red with blood. “It’s our curse.”

This crisis of faith lasts another three years. 

She doesn’t begrudge the Knot’s need to eat but she does not indulge herself either, she no longer partakes in the hunt, the killing. She grows weak as a result, but even in her lowest moments, she’s the strongest of them all.

It takes Crow’s refusal to eat alongside her that snaps her out of it. 

Whilst he was powerful in his own right, his steam required the nourishment of another, far more than she did. Ultimately, he’d gotten so weak and frail to the point she’d broken her fast just to see him back to health.

She had lost her children. She could not, would not lose her Crow as well.

...

The sixth one starts with a hope they knew better not to feel and ends with Crow kissing the tears from her face. “I think it’s time we stopped trying, Rosie.”

This time, he knows it’s the last, because it’s the only time she’d agreed.

He’d tried to tell her before, many times and in lots of different ways. Others too. But she hadn’t listened. To this day, he doesn’t understand why. He’d asked her, of course, but she could never voice the words.

“You know it’ll end horribly... it always does. Why do you do this to yourself?” He’d demanded one evening his infrequent temper made an unexpected appearance. 

He’d come home to the camp to find her reading a baby name book, of all things. When she’d ignored him, he wretched it out of her hands and thrown it across the trailer.

“This is all I have, Crow!” she’d explained with an ire that pivoted in desperation. “It’s the only time I know they’re safe. It’s the only time you can hear them.”

The weight of her words and the imploring look in her eyes has him falling to his knees in front of her, his face buried in her lap. He holds her, them each night for the duration of her pregnancy, savouring each kick to his hand, all flutters in his mind, every ring in his ears.

  
In the end, this fleeting bliss isn’t worth the agony of losing another and Rose finally relents, burying her last child knowing it’ll be the final time she’ll have to do this.

It offers some small measure of relief, if nothing else.

Once Rose’s body had recovered and Crow’s heart could beat again, he takes her to the nearest movie theatre to watch a midnight screening of Casablanca.

It’s a distraction, a reprieve.

After centuries of incomparable loss, there isn’t much left, save the company of one another.


End file.
